Sarah O'Rourke is a fashion editor with a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, a celebrated columnist husband and a chirpy four-year-old who refuses to remove his Batman outfit. But any complacency is obliterated by the re-appearance of Little Bee, a teenage victim of a vicious oil war whom the O'Rourkes encountered while holidaying on an African beach. Cleave has a fine ear for middle-class lives pitched into chaos: "A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was sitting at my husband's funeral with a superhero and a Nigerian refugee." But he is especially empathetic when writing in the voice of Little Bee, whose self-destructive impulse is revealed on a visit to a Kingston nursery class: "All the scissors were made of plastic and their ends were round and soft. If I suddenly needed to kill myself in that room, I did not know how I would be able to do it." The break-neck narrative is not without moments of horror, though, as Little Bee says: "Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it".